Open Source Homeland

I love the forced analogies here.

DHS: Minor League Baseball and Boy Scouts Step Up to the Plate to Encourage Families to Prepare for Emergencies
Minor League Baseball and the Boy Scouts of America are teaming up with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Ready Campaign for the fourth consecutive year to educate and encourage Americans to prepare for emergencies. Forty-nine baseball teams are joining many local Boy Scout councils in stepping up to the plate and encouraging fans to prepare for all types of emergencies, including natural disasters and potential terrorist attacks.

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Boy Scouts and community organizations will distribute emergency preparedness brochures throughout the 2007 season at team-sponsored Ready Nights across the country. The brochures and educational materials are available at www.ready.gov and provide valuable information to help individuals and families prepare for emergencies. Teams will also feature the Ready public service announcements on their scoreboards and in game programs.

“Like baseball, preparing for emergencies takes practice,” said Mike Moore, president and CEO of Minor League Baseball. “Our organization is proud to be part of Homeland Security’s efforts to educate Americans on how to prepare for emergencies through the Ready Campaign.”

Local Boy Scouts taking part in this effort can work toward earning their Emergency Preparedness merit badge and a Good Turn for America Award, which fosters joint community service projects between the Boy Scouts and organizations like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Over at the Department of Homeland Security site today, they announced that the “Science and Technology (S&T) directorate has established a program, TechSolutions, to support the first responder community by accelerating delivery of emerging technologies. TechSolutions is designed to collect technological requirements and provide solutions for first responders”.

“No one understands the needs of first responders better than first responders,” said Jay M. Cohen, Under Secretary for S&T. “Every day, hundreds of law enforcement officers, fire fighters, emergency medical services personnel and bomb-squad members think, ‘there’s a better way to do this,’ and we want to hear from them.”

S&T’s commitment to spiral development and rapid prototyping ensures funding for selected proposals within 45 days, and a solution demonstrated within 12 months of funding. Costs of the solutions should be commensurate with the proposal, but less than $1 million per project. Solutions also should deliver up to 100 percent of identified requirements, and first responders will partner with the department from start to finish.

First responders are encouraged to submit ideas that would aid the first responder community by increasing efficiency and on-the-job safety at: www.dhs.gov/techsolutions.

When you hit the Tech Solutions link, it redirects to a mailto (techsolutions@dhs.gov) for people to send a submission “limited to 3 printed pages”.

I hope to God that first responders don’t bother typing documents, waiting for days and months, and waiting for the government to spend “less than $1 million”.

I recognize this mumbo-jumbo from large software development projects. Wikipedia says “the spiral model is favored for large, expensive, and complicated projects.” Not what we need. When first responders say, “there’s a better way to do this”, they ought to find the cheapest, most suitable tools at their disposal to do it better. That’s a better “rapid prototype”.

The Department of Homeland Security’s ADVISE program is under scrutiny: Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff denies his agency wants to engage in data mining. If this is true, my question would be, “why not”?

Here’s some info on ADVISE from SourceWatch:

“At ADVISE’s core, semantic graphs are used to organize the data entities and their relationships. … A semantic graph organizes relational data by using nodes to represent entities and edges to connect related entities. Hidden relationships in the data are uncovered by examining the structure and properties of the semantic graph. Privacy and support policies are enforced by a security infrastructure. Several interfaces for browsing, querying, and viewing the results of queries are under development, including IN-SPIRE and Starlight, from the DHS National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC). The key to fusing disparate data from many sources in ADVISE is the exploitation of ‘precomputed’ relationship information by storing the data in a semantic graph. All nodes are related by the links between them on the graph.”

Sounds like a brilliant system. I hope that the research continues and doesn’t get knocked off its rocker like Policy Analysis Market– a brilliant idea disguised as a disgusting one. The search for bad guys (real ones, like the ones who knocked our buildings down, not fake ones, like the hanged Iraqi) requires using sophisticated tools to know the knowable. If that means we know some harmless secrets about people, so be it.

The next steps is to elect and keep in office a reasonable Executive Branch that doesn’t abuse power. Not simple, I know. But keeping ourselves dumb just because someone may hurt us when we’re smart is no way to live.